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In the early 1930s, at the request of Alfred Barr, Hitchcock collaborated with Philip Johnson (and Lewis Mumford) on "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition" at the Museum of Modern Art (1932), the exhibition that presented the new "International Style" architecture of Europe to an American audience. Hitchcock and Johnson's co-authored book The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 was published simultaneously with the MoMA exhibit.

Four years later Hitchcock's book, The Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times (1936) brought the career of American architect Henry Hobson Richardson out of obscurity while also arguing that the distant roots of European Modernism were actually to be found in the United States. Hitchcock's In the Nature of Materials (1942) continued to emphasize the American roots of Modern architecture, in this case by focusing on the career of Frank Lloyd Wright.

In 1948, Hitchcock published the essay in the book/exhibition catalogue Painting toward architecture: The Miller Company Collection of Abstract Art (Meriden, CT). The foreword was written by Alfred Barr, and the main organizer of the exhibition, and Miller Co. art director, was art collector Emily Hall Tremaine. The exhibition originated at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and travelled to several venues across the United States (1947–52). At the time, Hitchcock was teaching at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. He arranged for a second viewing, with a different selection of works, after his arrival to Smith College.[1][2][3][4]

Hitchcock was gay, one of several gay men in the arts and humanities to emerge from Harvard.[8]

Hitchcock focused primarily on the formal aspects of design and he regarded the individual architect as the chief determinant in architectural history. Hitchcock's work tended to diminish the role of broader social forces. He has sometimes been criticised for this "great man" or "genealogical" approach.

Over the course of Hitchock's career, he produced more than a dozen books on architecture. His Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1958) is an exhaustive study of more than 150 years of architecture that was widely used as a textbook in architectural history courses from the 1960s to the 1980s, and is still a useful reference today.

Hitchcock, Henry Russell, American Architectural Books: A List of Books, Portfolios, and Pamphlets on Architecture and Related Subjects published in America before 1895, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1962

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, In the Nature of Materials, 1887-1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York 1942; Da Capo Press, New York 1975 (paperback), ISBN0-306-80019-5

Lipstadt, Hélène, "Celebrating the Centenaries of Sir John Summerson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock: Finding a Historiography for the Architect-historian", The Journal of Architecture, 10/1 February 2005, pages 43–61.